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-You say you don't read the newspaper articles,
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
magazine articles that are written about you.
You don't read your own press.
I want to read you something that "Rolling Stone" wrote...
-Watermelon, watermelon, peanut butter, peanut butter.
Okay, fire away.
-"You can cast a pretty wide net
among Sheryl Crow's acquaintances
without finding anyone ready to describe her beyond
that familiar backhanded compliment of driven."
-Ew. Way to kick it up a notch, Steve.
-You are driven, though.
-I think the negative connotations that have been
associated with driven and perfectionist
usually get put into that category of bitch.
I think that's just by nature of the fact
that you have a woman who's at the head of a company
telling a bunch of men and women
how things have to be done.
I've been long
A long way from here
I put on a poncho, played for mosquitoes
And drank till I was thirsty again
-You have seemed to chart your own course.
-Multi-Grammy-winning artist
who has sold over 50 million albums worldwide.
- Found Geronimo's rifle, Marilyn's shampoo
And Benny Goodman's corset and pen
My definition of driven,
it's been the pressure I've put on myself.
You don't get there by just, you know, having a great time.
You get there by, like, digging deep.
If it makes you happy
It can't be that ba-a-a-ad
If it makes you happy
Then why the hell are you so sad?
If it makes you happy, yeah
It can't be that ba-a-a-ad
If it makes you happy
Then why the hell are you so sad?
Whoo!
I think from an early age, I knew music
was this joyful thing, this nerve-racking thing,
and then ultimately this rewarding thing.
I've always had real high highs and real low lows,
and that is a part of... who I am.
And I shall believe
Can we sing three-part on that?
And I shall believe
Are you singing it -- what are you singing?
- I shall believe
-What are you singing?
- I shall believe
-Sheryl is the voice of a generation
in the area of acknowledging flaw and heartbreak.
- Ah, ah, ah, ah
-We fell in love with her writing
because that was us, all of us.
- Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh
Ah-ah-ah-ah
Music gave me a sense of self.
It gave me permission to talk about my feelings.
It's something that also can be a curse
when it comes to needing to produce,
needing for it not to just be good,
for it to be great.
-Sheryl has fierce work ethic.
It says a lot about her drive
with which she attacks
something that she's into artistically.
-It's complicated to be a woman in the music industry
because you have to work twice as hard.
You have to be twice as loud to make your voice heard.
- Never gonna give up, no
-Everything was gonna cost Sheryl.
What are you gonna sacrifice as a woman
to be allowed this?
-It's always hard to look back and talk about who you were,
'cause it's only who you think you were.
-Settle a bet for me now.
Did you ever do a McDonald's commercial?
-Oh, yeah, yeah. It's a good time...
For the great taste of McDonald's
-That was you. Oh, that was you.
-My hometown is in the boot heel of Missouri.
I was a music geek at a really young age.
I wanted to know who played on everything,
and I wanted to know what all the words were.
I can remember going into the living room
and turning the lights off and playing the piano.
And that was where I felt like I had found myself.
I went to the University of Missouri
just like my older sister did.
I majored in music -- piano performance
with a secondary in education.
When I got out of school, I got into a cover band.
I interviewed for several teaching jobs
and wound up in Rockwood School District,
which is public school system.
I was engaged.
I was engaged to the guitar player in the band
who is a born-again Christian, and so he's like,
"If you're not gonna sing for the Lord,
we can't be together."
It did not feel like
I was breaking any of the Commandments,
and I was just like, "I like singing in bands.
I like playing keyboards. I like pop music.
I like getting better at my instrument."
Anyway, that was the beginning of the end
of that relationship,
the first of three engagements.
There are certain things that you look at
in the story of your life.
Like, not everything in your life
is gonna be mapped out for you.
They are gonna be things that happen
that you wouldn't have been able to dream about.
It's a good time for the great taste of McDonald's
I wound up making in that 45 minutes of work
well over what I'd made in two years of teaching.
And when I got that commercial, I felt like,
you know, if I'm ever gonna go
and try to make a living as an artist,
I need to do it now while I'm not married
and have my life in front of me.
I went home on a Tuesday and told my parents,
"I'm moving to L.A."
And they said, "When?"
I said, "I'm leaving on Sunday."
So...
I mean, it's kind of psycho.
I think pulling into L.A. when the only city you've ever seen
is St. Louis is kind of inexplicable.
So I got a book of studios, working studios in L.A.,
and then I got a Thomas Guide
and I wrote out all the addresses
and just drove around all day
and took my cassette tape in the door
and I'd say, "I am Sheryl Crow.
I'm brand-new in town. I have this demo tape.
Can you please make sure that
somebody hears it or whatever?"
I mean, totally naive.
I took my music around, and people didn't want to know
about a female.
And this is -- this is pre-Tracy Chapman, right?
And I came out one day and there was a boot on my car,
and I couldn't afford to get the boot off,
so I lost my car.
And I was just like, "Oh, my God. Why am I here?
What have I done? How do I get back home?"
I got a waitress job in the Valley
at a place called Le Cafe,
and lots of musicians came through there.
One night I was working and this man, Les Hooper, was in,
and I was told that he was a commercial producer.
Snuck him a tape.
I knew there was a chance I'd get fired.
The next morning, I was let go.
But he listened to my tape.
He called and said, "I don't usually
listen to people's tapes
if they give them to me in a restaurant or something."
He's like, "It's really good. Would you come in?
And I've got a spot I'm gonna have you try on."
So then I started getting, like, little pieces
of work here and there.
I remember calling my parents and saying,
"I'm doing a Johnny Mathis recording session today."
And they're like, "That's great!
You can come home now.
You've made it."
I think I was on the last episode of "Cop Rock."
It was a detective show that was a musical,
if you can imagine.
He's just a squirrel waiting for a pretty girl
He'd like to have his way
There was, like, a dance routine and a song.
In fact, I think it might have already been canceled,
and this was the last one.
- Come and get it, hey
I got something for you
Come on, come and get it
-I had a four-track recorder.
I would come home from work,
and I would sit at that four-track,
and I would sing with Chaka Khan
and then I would sing with Ann Wilson.
I was just always trying to get my voice
to where I could sort of mimic
and also where I could kind of control it.
I would practice, and I would try to write
on my keyboard, I had a drum program.
I didn't have any air conditioning,
and people all night, like 00 in the morning --
"Can you shut the fuck up?"
But I just was driven, you know,
and then I would sleep till noon and I would go to work.
And then it just was a cycle
until the Michael Jackson tour.
I found out about the Michael Jackson audition,
snuck in, and auditioned.
I basically just looked into the camera and said,
"Hi, Michael, my name is Sheryl Crow.
I'm from Missouri.
I was a schoolteacher and I'm a singer."
-I remember auditioning Sheryl.
She was just a little perky kid
and with a high voice, you know,
and she was cool. She had a cool sound.
And I thought, okay, let's go with this.
-We got on an airplane, a 747,
which I'd never seen.
I'd never been out of the country.
We were fitted for costumes.
We were given a look.
Like, I had this great, big blond hair.
It's just one of those things that really doesn't hit you
until you begin rehearsing, again, getting your passport.
You sell your car. You get rid of your apartment.
And then all of a sudden, you find yourself
in front of 60,000 people.
I came up the Michael Jackson tour
with some of the most important...
relationships in my life.
-The first time I met Sheryl was in Japan.
I was working on the "Bad" tour in a funny capacity
as sort of a marketing liaison
between Pepsi and Michael's camp.
I think most people assumed I worked for Pepsi,
which I didn't,
I knew they would never hire a person like me.
I do recall a moment at soundcheck.
Sheryl took the mic, and I definitely did
a turnaround double take, and I was like, "Wow."
- Then tell me just what did I do?
-Somebody introduced me to Sheryl.
We became comfortable as friends, really.
-He and I just became very, very, very close.
And one of the reasons we were so close
was he just knew so much about every genre of music.
So he and I just became really great friends.
We continued that friendship after the Jackson tour,
and then he ultimately became my manager.
-Sheryl, Scooter, and myself, we hung out a lot.
We spent a lot of time together,
you know, away from the band
and everything, and she was always so curious,
wanted to learn everything,
wanted to learn guitar, keyboards.
-Greg would come over, and he would give me
his philosophies on building musical hooks,
and we did a bunch of writing together.
-Sheryl was focused on songwriting
and developing her palette
and where she wanted to go from the get-go.
She was always making music.
- Hurry, operator, get redemption on the line
I was invited to hang out in the "A" camp.
While we were in Tokyo, I got a phone call
from one of Michael's security guys saying,
"Hey, Mike wants you to come over
and watch a couple of movies."
I go over to Michael's hotel room.
We watch "Amos 'n' Andy," and then we watched "Shane,"
and he's giggling, and Bubbles is around.
When Bubbles wouldn't behave, he would take a ballpoint pen
and he'd, like, poke him in the chest
to get his attention and stuff.
I mean, it was like...
It was crazy.
-He did poke him with a BIC.
He just would do like, "Quit it."
You know, you read about chimps,
what they can do to a person.
-Yeah, I mean, even when I'm telling it,
I'm thinking this is the weirdest thing ever.
But I didn't ever really get to know him.
I was pretty naive,
but I still thought it was so weird that Michael had,
you know, a couple little boys
on the road with him at different times.
Now, knowing what is alleged,
it makes me sad for the life he had.
Obviously, it makes us all sad for the children.
It's just -- it's devastating to even think about.
-"I Just Can't Stop Loving You" was a big
duet moment in the tour.
Sheryl was put in that spotlight,
and she commanded it.
She belted it out nose-to-nose with Michael.
-She couldn't believe she had to walk out
in this tight miniskirt and wear these wigs
that were almost as big as she was.
You know, massive wig, you know, and all made up
and all dolled up in the heels and everything.
- When morning awakes me
Sometimes he'd really want it to look sexual,
you know, like, he'd grab my hip.
And by the end of that tour,
everywhere in all the tabloids,
I was gonna marry him, I was gonna have his baby.
-The tabloid aspect of the Jackson tour
was super extreme.
The press was saying that
Sheryl and Michael were a couple.
-I mean, please, you know?
You sing the duet, so obviously,
"Oh, then you must be seeing each other."
"No, we're singing a duet."
-Every article would be
so completely outlandish about me.
In hindsight, it probably was
planted with publicists and things.
- And if I stop
-I think the first time I spoke my mind, lyrically,
it was a song called "What I Can Do for You."
The song is really from the standpoint
of the sexual harasser, particularly in our business.
It was about my own experience with sexual harassment.
What I can do for you
There's no one else on God's green earth can do
There was a lot of interest
from Michael Jackson's manager to manage me.
This manager was signed to manage Michael specifically,
and only, so for him to manage me,
he would have been fired.
Now, I don't know anything
about how the music business works.
I know you get your songs to somebody
who either is a producer or is inside the record label,
or they come see you,
and then you worked really hard
and you were a really nice person
and you wrote good songs,
and then you made it or you didn't make it.
I have so much to offer
If you just be nice
If you do what I say and don't make me say it twice
He said, "This is what we're gonna be able to do.
We will guarantee
that the album will come out in the top 10
and the single will come out as well in the top 10."
Within a matter of a couple weeks,
any kind of event that was held,
I always had to go with Michael's manager,
and then the sexual harassment started
with his manager being, like, all over me,
and it was a constant battle of keeping him off of me.
-Frank was a gangster.
You know, let's not sugarcoat that.
I mean, he wasn't cast in the movie "Goodfellas"
by accident.
-She confided in me that there was pressure on her
to become more familiar with Frank
on levels that she was uncomfortable.
-I told the three backup singers
that I was working with what had happened,
and I was really terrified.
So I finally contacted a very high-powered music attorney,
and I said, "Look, I'm frightened.
I've already been told if I ever blow this cover
that I will never work again
and that I need to watch my back."
And then he ultimately, at the end of the meeting, said,
"Look, you will come out ahead if you can just stick it out."
And the last thing he said was that, "There are people
that would die to be in this situation."
And I just sunk into the darkest, most depressed place,
just the disappointment of the way the real world works.
And I was really destroyed.
What I can do for you
There's no one else, no one else
No one else gonna do for you
Just ask anybody
And they'll tell you that it's true
There's no one else on earth
Can do the things that I can do for you
Yeah, for you
-One day I was sitting in my office,
I got a call from Frank.
He said to me that he didn't like what she had to say
in one of her songs, and he said,
"Well, we're gonna sue you." And I said, "Go for it."
And I never heard from him again.
-When I got home from the Jackson tour
and after I kind of pulled myself together,
I auditioned for this band called Toy Matinee
that Kevin Gilbert was in,
and I got the part of keyboard player
and started dating Kevin, which is such a cliché.
But this guy was so talented.
So he invited me to this thing called
the Tuesday Night Music Club.
-What in the world is the Tuesday Night Music Club?
-A club of wild partiers
who all happen to be artists in L.A.
It was a pretty heady crowd.
I mean, it was a lot of drinking
and some guys dropping acid.
I mean, it was like freethinkers.
-Kevin Gilbert brought her in
to our Tuesday Night session very early on.
It was unbelievable.
Something of a higher order came together.
-I think the first session we did,
we wrote and recorded "Leaving Las Vegas."
-Sheryl took the lyric sheet and started singing.
She sat over on a chair over in the corner and sang it,
and she sang the shit out of it.
-I remember Bill saying to me, "I love your singing
when you're not trying to sing great."
-The diversity of her vocals, I mean, it's unbelievable.
She owns every song, owns every character.
When she sings and also when we write,
everything came to life.
-I think up until that point, there was not, like, a,
"We're making a record for this girl."
And then Bill started really managing the situation,
only letting people come in when needed.
And Kevin didn't like not being invited,
so that started to cause real friction,
and our relationship started deteriorating.
-I was in charge of getting it made
and curating it, if that's the word.
It's like a stew.
The other band guys -- they weren't there for that.
-We would drink a bunch,
we'd go to the bookstore down the road,
and we bought a poetry book by this man named Wyn Cooper.
And there was a poem in it first thing called "Fun."
It started off with, "All I want to do
is have a little fun before I die."
And so we had this groove going
that was somewhere between Stealers Wheel
and a Marvin Gaye track,
and I picked up the poetry book
and started just kind of free form,
All I wanna do is have a little fun before I die
Says a man next to me out of nowhere
And I just kind of acted out the poem.
And then we put this hook in --
All I wanna do
And that became the song.
All I wanna do is have some fun
I got a feeling I'm not the only one
Well, all I wanna do
By the end of the record, I was thinking, you know,
that song is really cool, but it's -- it's such a B-side
and it's so esoteric and so quirky.
We should just leave it off.
And Bill's like, "We can't leave it off."
And I was like, "Well, I got to contact this guy
and tell him we've used his poem."
So we looked for him. I called him.
I was like, "I know you don't know me.
We've used your poem.
We want to give you, you know, half the songwriting,
should the thing ever see the light of day."
And he's like, "Oh, that's great, that's great.
I like a good beer buzz early in the morning
And Billy likes to peel the labels
Off those bottles of Bud
The anniversary Woodstock in '94 was a game changer.
We came out and we played our hearts out,
and then suddenly we were being noticed.
-It's really quite a thing to witness.
It's like a match striking
and then somebody throwing oil on it.
It moves so fast you don't even know
what your next move is.
- Until the sun comes up over Santa Monica Boulevard
-All of a sudden you're hearing it, like,
in drugstores and grocery stores
and then magazines are talking about it.
Hairdressers are giving people the Sheryl Crow curls.
The song was everywhere.
- All I wanna do is have some fun
-Oh!
-There's a moment when a hit song
takes on its own life.
It becomes bigger than the song
and sometimes bigger than the artist.
And that's definitely something to watch out for,
especially on your first album.
-They put "Leaving Las Vegas" out
and it started to have traction.
We started to get some TV, and I got David Letterman.
-Now, this right here, kids, is her debut CD entitled
"Tuesday Night Music Club."
Making her first appearance with us,
here's Sheryl Crow.
Sheryl, come on out.
Life springs eternal
On a gaudy neon street
Not that I care at all
Now I'm...
You know, you grow up and you watch TV,
and you see Ed Sullivan and you see Dick Clark
and he's interviewing people and stuff.
And that's TV, you know,
and then all of a sudden you're on TV.
I'm leaving Las Vegas
David Letterman, who was really the first person
to have me on national TV,
who had kind of discovered the record on his own
driving back and forth to his house in Connecticut,
said, you know, "Come over and talk to me,"
and, you know, it was Dave Letterman.
-Nice to see you. Thanks for being here.
-Thank you. -Have a seat there.
The crowd goes crazy. -Whaa!
He said, "So what is this song?
Is this thing autobiographical?"
And I'm so nervous, I'm like, "Well, I mean, kind of."
-I'm guessing -- and I think I know the answer to this --
that song in some way must be autobiographical.
Is that correct? -Uh, yes.
-Which is a stupid question for a guy like him.
It's like, it's a character sung by Sheryl Crow.
This is a little complicated to describe, right?
So she said, "Yeah."
Well, you know...
-I've never lived there. -You never lived in Las Vegas.
-No, I haven't. -You worked there?
-Haven't really worked there either.
-Have you ever been there?
-Yes, I've lost a lot of money there.
-Could you find it on a map? -Yes.
I wasn't prepared for how overwhelming
it would feel to have somebody that I had watched on TV
ask me questions.
Originally, the song was very metaphorical for Los Angeles,
that people move there with these great dreams
and they wind up being very disillusioned.
And so that's what Las Vegas seems to exemplify.
-Then why didn't you call the song
"I'm Leaving Los Angeles"?
In fact, every major American city --
"I'm Leaving Minneapolis."
"I'm Leaving Milwaukee."
-Milwaukee's a good one, yeah.
"I'm Leaving New York"... shortly.
-No.
-Yes, if I could go back and do it again,
certainly I would feel my feet
and I would try to put myself in my body and I would say,
"You know, what a great experience being in a room
with all these incredible, intellectual people
and being able to jam a song out
and put together lyrics together."
And, you know, I could have told that story, you know,
but I couldn't think.
-The drama that followed -- it was a shit show.
-And I came home the next day to just a massive blow-up
of the guys in the group saying,
"She's taken totally credit for it."
And then come to find out that there had been a book
called "Leaving Las Vegas."
And the title was brought in to us
by one of the guys in the Tuesday Night Music Club.
And he had said we had promised the writer,
John O'Brien, publishing,
and that I was fully aware of it.
And after David Letterman, the author committed suicide.
And...
I just...
I mean, I just went into a hole.
I -- I just went into a hole.
-The press unfairly cast her as the bad guy,
and she carried that weight for a long time.
-It's that good-girl thing where you're just like,
"I would never hurt anybody.
I would never want anybody to be hurt."
And then it's all of that, you know.
It all ties into...
you know, work hard, be a good person.
And then you just -- all of a sudden,
you just wake up and you're --
wake up and you realize, wow.
What happened? So...
Can we just take a break for a second?
Picking up an "L.A. Weekly" and seeing an interview
with the person that was in Tuesday Night Music Club,
and to read it in print and to see the lies --
it changed me.
-I never supported that narrative.
The press wants a drama.
-It took that little, innocent, young person
that was on David Letterman
and made me not want to be accessible anymore.
-And the Best New Artist is...
-Sheryl Crow.
-At that point, there was quite a lot of friction
with the Tuesday Night Music Club.
And I remember looking out and seeing them
and not feeling the happiness or the pride.
But nonetheless, they were there,
and just how self-conscious I felt.
Most importantly, I want to thank Bill Bottrell,
who helped me make this record,
and all the artists I've been very inspired by --
David Baerwald, David Ricketts, Kevin Gilbert.
Wyn Cooper, who actually came up with
"All I wanna do is have some fun."
Most importantly, though, I want to thank my manager,
who's a first-time manager who's been working for
no money up until now for me.
He's my best friend. His name's Scooter.
And he really deserves this.
By the end of the night,
the last award -- it's the biggest award.
You're up against Bruce Springsteen.
I was not thinking that I was gonna win.
-And the Record of the Year is...
..."All I Wanna Do," Sheryl Crow.
- All I wanna do
Bill was very consistent with who he was
when we made the record.
We accepted the Grammys together
and it was a celebration.
I mean, it really was. And that changed everything.
As soon as that record won Record of the Year,
Best New Artist, Song of the Year,
our record sales doubled.
-Sheryl was working 24/7 --
videos, interviews, concerts.
It was just never-ending.
-The irony of it was, though,
we hadn't seen any money from it.
My manager was still working out of his closet
across the hall from his apartment,
and I was still driving an old Volkswagen.
Volkswagen.
-Sheryl and I would share a hotel room.
I would get up at 00 in the morning,
go down to the lobby,
and have my calling card in the phone booth.
And that was that.
And then if, like, I had a girlfriend and she'd call
or Sheryl was dating somebody and they'd call,
we would kind of make believe, like,
"Oh, let me see if she's here,"
and then count 10 seconds and hand the phone over.
-Those were awesome days.
I mean, you know, you got off stage,
you hung out with your band,
played music, drank some beers,
crawled into bed, and woke up the next morning,
did press all day, soundcheck, gig,
drink some beers, watch a movie, go back to bed.
It was like the same thing on repeat.
We finally got a tour bus,
and that was, like, the biggest day ever.
Come back, come back. This one down here is mine.
So you can see you have the necessary tools --
leather hat, Pumas,
and a curling iron, of course, and other things
that we don't have to really get into, do we?
Ha, ha!
It was a pink bus and it had a tilted champagne glass
with little droplets, and whenever people would yell,
"Who's in the tour bus?" we'd always yell,
"Dolly Parton!"
I got a dog named Scout.
I adopted him.
It's Scout!
And he went on every tour,
with the exception of overseas, for 13 years.
Ah, happiness.
-I remember driving down Sunset and seeing her name
on the marquee of the Whiskey.
Like, "Oh, man, she did it!
She did it! Wow, this is crazy."
- Ah, yeah, yeah, yeah, run
Run baby, run baby, run baby, run
Run baby, run baby, run baby, run baby
Run
Run baby, run baby, run baby, run baby
Run
Gotta keep on running, run
Run baby
We were in France,
which was where my record was doing really well.
00 in the morning, I get a call from Mick Jagger
asking me if I would come
and do their pay-per-view with them in Miami.
And they were gonna send a private jet,
which I'd never seen a private jet.
And I got over there, and Keith came over
and put his arm around me, and, "Hey, little sister,"
which he has called me ever since.
-I had known something about Sheryl.
I had heard her records.
What a great voice, you know, really, you know, strong.
-We rehearsed it. It went fine.
The next day I got up, I threw up all day long.
I was totally terrified.
I get ready. I go over there.
I'm telling Scooter, "I just don't think I can do this."
-She's flown a long way to get here.
I'm hoping she's got over her jet lag.
-And right before I was walking out,
as Mick was announcing me,
Bobby Keys handed me some tequila and said,
"Take a shot of courage," and pushed me out.
-I wish her luck. Beautiful Miss Sheryl Crow.
I got nasty habits
I take tea at three
With the meat I eat for dinner
I must be hung up for a week
-She would very well handle Mick Jagger, you know.
To me, just standing in the back going...
"Wow, this girl's strong, you know?
She's not putting up with any of his bullshit."
- Don'cha think there's a place for us
Right across the street?
Don'cha think there's a place for you
In between the sheets?
- Yeah -She was very strong girl.
Later on, a very genuine girl.
In a way, very sensitive and very sweet, you know.
But there's a lot of tough in there,
and, you know, which is a good mixture.
-I went home, and Bill and I decided we'd get together
and write, and we drank martinis
and went out for a great dinner and did some writing,
and then we decided we would go to New Orleans
to make our record.
The first record had sold like five or six million copies,
and we headed down to Kingsway with this immense amount
of pressure for the sophomore record
to live up to the first record.
You know, that word "potential,"
how it can be so negative.
Like, "You have such potential."
It's almost like, "Man, you could really blow it."
What potential, you know?
Our first day at Kingsway was kind of quirky.
We get there, and this woman rolls out from under the board
on, like, an automobile caddy on her back
with goggles and a soldering iron.
So we thought, well, that doesn't bode well
for the beautiful new console.
We're kind of just getting,
you know, acclimated to the place.
And as this woman was leaving, she kind of scolded Bill
about putting his drink on the console.
And so immediately it was like,
"Mm. This is a weird way to start."
-I do have a very vague memory
of asking whoever it was
that was on the other side of the console
to remove their beverage from the console
because it's inappropriate, and everybody knows that.
-I think we spent the day in there
kind of messing around,
and more things didn't work than did.
-Daniel Lanois built the studio.
I swear he threw half of it together
before we got there, you know?
-They think the studio sucks. Nothing's working.
The gear won't work if you're mad at it.
-We're trying to work, and it's Sheryl's got this,
"Yeah, but" attitude.
-We broke and went to dinner and once again had some wine.
And the next morning I woke up with a headache
and no producer.
-I'm like, "I don't belong here."
And I got on a plane and came home.
-I was there and had booked the studio and was panicked.
I called Scooter.
-Sheryl said, "Bill has left. He's done.
He's not -- he's not gonna work on the record."
It was a frightening moment for her.
And he said, "Why don't you call Jeff
and see if he's interested in coming down."
The guitar player Jeff Trott,
I didn't really know very well.
He played a little like an '80s take
on Keith Richards, if you will.
-I get this call, like, really super early in the morning,
and it's Sheryl.
She's like, "Well, hey,
what are you -- what are you up to?"
And I said, "Well, you know, exciting news.
I'm going on the road with The Wallflowers."
And there was complete silence.
And then she comes back with...
-I don't think there's probably a chance in the world
you will consider this,
but would you come to New Orleans
and help me make my second record?
-So she sort of put it to me, you know,
"Well, would you prefer
playing cover songs with your friends
or maybe recording songs that you have written with me
for my record?"
So check this out.
-Oh, my gosh.
Look at your cute little shag haircut.
-The shag.
-Why did you have a trombone there?
-I have no idea,
-"Brian the cloud." -The cloud.
We called Brian MacLeod, our favorite drummer.
First thing we did was we named Kingsway
"Dan's Lamps and Things"
because there was, like, all kinds of
beautiful antiques everywhere,
gorgeous lamps and big wooden baronial beds.
And, you know, it was just the most romantic place.
Our engineer was Trina Shoemaker.
She wasn't just good for a girl.
She was just good.
-For me, I have a unusual love of the equipment,
almost indecent.
It's the constant in my life. I go to the gear for comfort.
It replaced, in many cases, personal relationships.
-She's a brilliant engineer.
She also emotionally bonded with Sheryl.
She was a strong female artist in her own right,
and they kind of powered through together.
-That's what Trina looked like to me.
-Yeah. -And she'd be looking up.
-What was it for us two young women trying to duke it out?
And I think, well, of course she kept me near
because I was like her. I was alone.
No husband, no kids, no family nearby.
Bold, willing to fight,
literally willing to, like, punch people.
I wanted to protect her,
and I think that helped a little bit from time to time.
And she liked me for that.
-Kingsway just felt like a safe place.
I could close the door,
and there really wasn't anything left over
from the first album,
the pressure of people thinking, "Okay, well,
let's see what she does, because from what we hear,
a whole set of guys wrote the record
and she was barely there."
I'd stop reading any reviews, anything like that.
I had just quietened everything.
Change
- A change would do you good
- Would do you good
- A change would do you good
- I think a change
- A change would do you good
- Would do you good
- A change would do you good
-That record was magnificent, everything about it.
It then raised her to say,
"You are a producer, you are a record maker.
You are a decision maker. You're a writer.
You're a player."
I was just so happy for her
'cause all I just kept thinking is, "You did it."
-Sheryl set out, wrote the songs,
produced the record, created the next step
of her musical vision completely on her own.
- A change
would do you good
Would do you good
- A change would do you good
-Sheryl! Sheryl! - A change
-Give us some play! -Sheryl, turn your head.
- Would do you good - Do you good
- A change would do you good
-You can point to a lot of women
who've had commercial success
in the pop world as a singer, as an artist.
But, you know, there's not a lot of producers,
not a lot of engineers.
I mean, if she was a man,
people would talk about her like Prince.
I mean, Prince loved her.
- Every day is a winding road
- Road, mm
- I get a little bit closer
- Ah, ah
- Every day is a faded sign
- Yeah
Sheryl Crow, y'all.
- I get a little...
-Take five.
-Hi, everybody in Kennett and everywhere around Kennett,
whoever's seeing this.
Scout and I just want to wish you guys
a Happy Christmas, Happy New Year.
And we'll see you around the holidays.
-There are so many things
that have happened to us in our lives
since Sheryl has become so well-known
that it's kind of hard to separate
the real and the unreal,
and it's just flabbergasting.
I mean, you're -- whew!
-Hey, thanks for bringing your mom and dad.
I love meeting people's parents.
-My mom and dad are here! -There's mom and dad.
There they are, right there.
-I taught piano lessons, and I had students
come into the house all the time.
-We had three pianos and an organ in that house,
and they would practice and she'd be cooking,
and she would scream out to one of them,
"That's not a B! That's a B-flat!"
or something of that nature.
-I was always getting bested, you know?
"That's James Taylor. That is not your lesson."
They were into swing band.
In fact, they had a swing band.
They would come home on the weekends
and bring their friends.
-We had a book, I believe, of 400 songs.
-This is Sheryl.
And this is Sheryl.
Sheryl.
Now, you can tell who's getting the lion's share
of the pictures right now.
Here we go.
Karen, Sheryl, and Kathy.
And our youngest child is Steve.
-I remember all three of us girls sleeping on the stairs
so we could hear them playing music
and dancing and smoking and drinking,
and we just wanted to be, you know, a part of it.
-That must have had a big influence on you,
all those things that, like -- -Yeah, definitely.
In fact, they started me on piano about the age of five,
and they were the kind of parents that said,
"Oh, play that little thing for all of our friends."
So that's how I wound up where it am.
-It worked. It worked, you see.
- Back on gold dust...
-And so I dug more into music.
- Take yourself...
-I started getting into records
that started to give me a vision of me as a person,
and that was the James Taylor stuff
and the Carole King,
Stevie Wonder and Fleetwood Mac.
I wanted to be in the room with those people,
and that was what was interesting to me
was why things would sound the way they would sound.
And it was then that I started to feel like,
okay, these are my people
and I'm supposed to be on that train.
"Love is a Good Thing" was a song that I wrote
that was, you know, taken from the headlines.
-Now, Walmart says it won't sell her newest album,
and fans like Lane Benson don't like it.
-I really don't like it. I don't --
I don't like Walmart telling me what to do.
-It is the nation's largest retailer.
One record industry executive estimates
Crow stands to lose at least 400,000 album sales.
-Well, they'll probably have to go out of town for it.
Mm-hmm. -What do you think about that?
-Well, I hate for our people here
to be inconvenienced that way,
but I feel sure they'll get it.
-For somebody like me who grew up in a small town,
that's the only place you can buy a record.
And so to be given the choice, "We will not carry it,
or you can change it to Kmart and we'll carry it" --
that, I think, actually fueled my conviction even more.
I was like, "Well, wait a minute.
You can't have it both ways."
-We are not telling Sheryl Crow
she cannot sell the song
and make it available to others.
We're just saying that Walmart itself
will not sell the product."
-May have to come all the way to Memphis to get that CD.
-All they wanted to do was just have some fun.
-It was the first time I ever experienced
anything like that and realized,
Oh, there is importance to music.
There's importance to speaking the truth.
And some people are not gonna like that.
And that's something you just have to get used to.
-At any chance that we feel
we can use our music to give back,
we are not only happy to do it,
we actually almost hunger to do it
so that you can feel that your music
is not just for your own pleasure
and hopefully that your words, your songs,
will also touch a chord into people
to increase their empathy and their humanity.
The Lilith Fair tour was really eye-opening
for so many of us women out there making music
'cause I think we'd been out there in our tour busses
with our bands traveling around, you know,
like, in space, in outer space,
in our own little rocket ships.
And all of a sudden we all landed in this one place
and we came off our busses
and we were actually finally able to meet,
and you realized that there was a sisterhood out there.
-By 1996, there were quite a few more females
that were getting played at radio.
One of them was Alanis Morissette,
Aimee Mann, and another was Sarah McLachlan.
- I'd no longer be in your mind
The difficult kind but you won't see
-I remember vividly Sarah McLachlan
calling me and saying,
"Have you ever tried to have someone open up for you
that's a woman? The promoters are saying
you can't have more than one woman on a bill,
and I'm going to disprove them."
-Now, some business types said, "Oh, that'll never work.
Nobody will buy tickets to all women all summer long."
Well, 20,000 people showed up today,
and the Lilith Fair will visit 35 cities.
-It was just women who commercially do well.
We run our businesses. We make money.
So why are you men deciding what can and can't be?
But what you don't think about is the kid that's out there
in the audience looking at that and going,
"I can do that.
I can get up and play guitar
and have a band behind me and be the boss."
-Tell you what.
I was out there all the way up there on that hill
in Lilith Fair when I saw Sheryl Crow play here
two nights in a row.
It honestly changed my life,
and I would not be the artist that I am without Sheryl Crow
and the influence that she's had on me.
And then to get to a place where she's kind enough
to be my friend and give me advice
and teach me things and sing with me --
I can't even get my head around it.
-I just was astounded that she was so rock and roll.
And you never questioned
whether or not Sheryl was the boss,
and I was so drawn to that --
you know, as a young woman, so influenced by it.
Seeing her play the bass, you know, I'll never forget,
like, picking up that bass guitar and, like,
telling the guy I was in a band with,
"Yeah, I played bass" --
Because I had to learn the "Leaving Las Vegas"
bass line,
and just thinking, like,
"Yeah, this is it, this is what I want to do,
I want to front a band like this
and I want to have an electric guitar
and I want to play bass and I want to be a rock star
like Sheryl Crow."
-I think we should give it up to Sarah
for putting this whole thing together.
Anywhere where people are comfortable with who they are,
even on the Lilith Fair, you could look out
and you would see families out there,
and you would see girls and their moms,
and you would see a lot of lesbians.
-I like that about Sheryl so much,
that she holds her space.
She's straight as an arrow, but God,
the lesbians love Sheryl.
She's important to queer people,
and when you're important to queer people,
it means you're on the cutting edge of the real shit
of what's really going on.
-After that tour, which had been really successful
and really fun, I came home to L.A.
and I was engaged with a casting director,
somebody I met on the "Leaving Las Vegas" video.
-This is the young man that Sheryl was engaged to.
-That was back in, uh...
-That was in 1995.
Can you maybe turn that off?
-I was just starting my career,
and it was starting to take off,
and it's really difficult for someone to sort of be
swept up in that and still keep their sense of self.
We were just better as friends; in fact,
by the time we got engaged, I feel like we probably
were pulling apart.
I'd been gone for so long.
I did have a couple of songs on the "Sheryl Crow" record
that were inspired by our relationship
becoming more platonic.
I woke this morning, now I understand
What it means to give your life to just one man
Afraid of feeling nothing, no bees or butterflies
My head is full of questions and my house is full of lies
And this is home
Home
This is home
I think part of my pull is always that
I really like the... the hang,
I like the camaraderie with the guys,
and part of me is like,
I don't want to miss out on that.
So I decided I would just...
pick up and move to New York and change my scenery.
And you can probably see a pattern here.
Somebody said you gotta get away
Don't wanna go back home again
I set up a studio in the Meatpacking District.
I mean, it was just a very colorful neighborhood.
-It was warehouses and butchers
and carcasses hanging.
You could smell the blood on the streets.
-Jeff and I started working with Trina
in a studio that we set up
in this building called The Globe.
-She had bought all this equipment.
It hadn't seasoned into the room yet.
It takes a little while for gear to get comfortable
and bugs to get worked out,
yet we were going forward and cutting a record there.
Antigone laid across the road
-Now the celebrity is locked in,
I mean, the celebrity machine, not the human being,
so now she's really got to deliver.
It's laughter that comes up when I cry for you
And this heart may love again before it learns
"Globe Sessions," of all the records,
was the most kind of pure,
I don't want to say, like, barfing out,
but I mean, everything was so close to the surface,
so immediate.
I've gotten used to crash and burn
Yes, I've gotten used to the crash and burn
A lot of that came out,
particularly in "Difficult Kind"
and definitely in "Crash and Burn" --
I mean, both of those songs, which I feel like
are kind of sister songs,
talk about somebody who's not that easy
to have a relationship with,
who is highly sensitive and highly emotional
and super tough and strong;
and the other aspect of being with someone
who has the job that I have is I'm just not around very much.
-There is a price to be paid for being gone all the time.
Obviously, I felt like it was worth it
because I'm still out here, but, you know,
it is difficult to stay away from home
so many times and so long.
-All I can say is I'm single
and I've been single a long time,
and that has got to be, you know,
the tour bus -- my relationship with the road,
you know, it -- it is difficult,
it's a lot to ask for,
you know, to ask somebody to stay home and wait.
-We were both at this,
like, massive transition in our lives,
figuring out who we were,
what we wanted in life, and Sheryl's like,
"Oh, well, you should just move in!"
Like, "Why -- why are we spending so little time
together by going to dinner four nights a week?"
So I lived with Sheryl.
She might be the friend
that I've spent the most time watching her work.
We went on the ride together.
- Ooh
-And the best rock album is...
"The Globe Sessions," Sheryl Crow.
- Ooh
Ooh
Did you know when you go it's the perfect ending
To the bad day I've gotten used to spending
When you go all I know is
You're my favorite mistake
-A person is not a celebrity, a person is a person,
celebrity' a machine that gets hungry and it has to feed.
-Sorry, let me get .
-Yes! Oh, wow.
-Yeah, you're going to get hit up quite a bit on the way out.
-Here you go. -Thanks so much.
-Who's this for?
-It's, uh, for Julie.
-I was born into this industry,
and you would think I'd seen so much of it.
But being an iconic rock star?
It's a whole other thing.
-Fame is not natural,
and it is also a very energetic experience
where people are projecting their energy at you.
-There's hero worship,
and there's, you know...
idolizing.
But, you know, also projecting trauma
and all kinds of stuff.
-Her music is so powerful.
It just touches you.
It helped me get through a lot of things in my life:
coming out, getting off drugs.
You know, it's -- it's just incredible.
-Imagine every time you step out of your house,
people stop to look at you --
every time.
And people smile at you and they want to be with you,
and they tell you how great you are --
every time!
It does something to you, messes with you!
-And then you're going to have this thing where,
okay, you're in magazines,
and you're invited to perform on that,
and you're nominated for that,
and then you're not nominated anymore,
and then you're not in magazines,
and you're not at that party.
And who am I?
And, well, what do I need to do to get back to that?
-A lot of non-musical things come along with success
that you didn't know was part of the package.
And it knocks you off what you were doing in the first place.
And it can take years to navigate through that.
And some people never get it figured out.
They crash and burn.
-It's not natural,
and it doesn't have anything to do
with being good or being bad,
and it doesn't anything to do with the quality of your work.
I-it's just a giant mind-fuck.
Steve McQueen
Underneath your radar screen
You'll never catch me today
No
But I think people come to see you for a lot of reasons.
They want to feel some kind of emotion.
They want to forget about what's going on
in their immediate life
for just a couple of hours,
and there's a gift and a responsibility in that for me.
-With Sheryl, there's always two sides to it.
The struggle to make something great and the pressure
and her own perfectionism
or strive for that thing she wants is always in there.
-This is what I want to do.
Okay, this is what I want to do.
I want to cancel a week of shows.
Okay, you got to hear me out.
We're in a situation here
where I don't want to do any more bad shows.
We need to get another lighting system in here.
On stage the screen is overpowering us.
I'm out front. It looks ridiculous.
I don't want to do any more half-assed touring.
I worked my ass off,
and the band is great and I have a great crew.
The only thing holding us back is the production.
And I want it to stop.
Crazy hollow frequency .
I'm getting --
-Music for Sheryl,
I'm not always sure that she enjoyed it.
I think that she had, like, a possession with it
that dominated her entire life,
put the celebrity on her shoulders,
and nearly crushed her.
-I-I -- I'm not -- I'm not discounting the stuff
that made it all happen and all that.
But you're killing yourself here.
I -- you're right about why it fucked you up and all that.
-But you work --
-I know that.
But -- but draw the line, is what I'm saying.
It was fucked up; the lights, it fucked your head up
and all that, but you were pretty brilliant.
Around the turn of the century, Interscope Records,
which was run by Jimmy Iovine and Tom Whalley,
took over A&M Records.
They absorbed them.
-At Interscope,
I was working with Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg; we had Tupac,
we had No Doubt; also 4 Non Blondes,
Primus and Helmet.
-I suddenly went from
having a relationship with a record label
to being one of a bunch of artists,
and I have a new record.
-The trick is not just having a hit record,
the trick is not having a really credible record;
the trick is both.
-As I look back and I think about making records
where you go in empty-handed
and you write and record as you go,
it was really, really successful
for the first, like, three records,
and then the wear and tear of coming off the road,
being tired, not really having had many life experiences,
and then going into the studio and just sitting there
and going, "Okay, what am I going to write about?"
The boat ran aground.
And then it was just a source of glaring frustration.
-One summer, we wrote 40 or 50 song ideas,
and she was just having a really --
a rough patch of, you know,
"Hey, I don't have anything important to say,
I don't know what to say."
-Tonight you go where?
You open up for a young new guy?
-I open up for a beginning up-and-comer, Bob Dylan.
-Bob Dylan. -Bob Dylan offered
his friendship, just said, "You know, I think you're
going to be around for a long time,
if you ever need anything, give me a shout."
So I call him and I say,
"I'm really having trouble finishing anything.
I-I can't seem to finish a song, I mean,
I feel like I've been doing this for like eight months
and not finishing anything,"
and he's like, "Ooh, that's bad."
And I'm thinking, Oh, gosh. And then I said,
"Well, I heard that you had had writer's block.
So I wanted to call you and pick your brains."
"No, I never have," and I'm thinking, Oh, no!
-You have a certain instinct
and a certain amount of training
and a certain type of impact of the song
you're looking for; you have to hope the person
you're standing next to writes it.
-He came in and out, which I really wasn't used to.
I wasn't used to having anybody
coming in and out of the studio
while I was producing and working.
-I lived in a recording studio my whole life,
so I can go down to the studio,
and that was an advantage that I had
because I understand the language really well.
-He had suggestions, some of which I used
and some of which I didn't.
-Sheryl I was in New York and she said,
"Well, like, you know, can you just jump on a plane
and come out here and let's just -- let's just do this."
And I was playing around with this idea of being...
uh, soaking wet
and wanting -- wanting sun, you know,
"hey, I'm going to go to New York
and soak up some sun."
I thought, "'Soak up the sun' sounds like a good."
- Wanna tell them that I
Got no one to blame
Every time I feel lame
I'm looking up
-So I had five hours from Portland to New York.
I carried the chorus in my head
for the duration -- for that five hours.
Go to Sheryl's house,
I said, "Well, I have an idea. I don't know if it's really...
It might be too poppy for you."
She's like, "Okay, well, yeah, let's write it."
- I'm gonna soak up the sun
I'm gonna tell everyone to lighten up
Jimmy would sit at the desk
and he'd keep his BlackBerry under the desk
while he was listening, and I just was like,
"Okay, you can't -- you can't really get into it
when you're like, "Mm, what's, uh,
what's going on with Dre, and..." you know?!
So I sit at the door
and I texted him from my BlackBerry,
and said, "Would you put that damn thing down!"
And he -- he looked up and he was like...
-I'm sure we had some up-downs, some down days.
The bottom line is,
all you have left in the end is the record,
and that's a great record.
- So I can rock on
-A record would be finished, and we'd hand it in,
and Jimmy would say,
"It's great, I need another one."
-I'm the kind of person that just says,
"Let's keep going till it's right and don't stop."
When I was making "C'mon, C'mon,"
I was having real bouts of depression,
just real low lows, and I..
I didn't really know why.
-Are you going to stop touring anytime soon
and just kind of relax?
-When I die. -No?
I...
Gonna soak up the sun --
-I'm not getting weird, I just want one autograph.
- I wanna soak up the sun
Got my 45 on so I
I can rock on
-This record is filled with big choruses
and hit-oriented rock songs like "Steve McQueen,"
and "You're an Original," and "Soak Up the Sun,"
and there is this little short piece
called "Weather Channel."
It's sort of a focal point of the record for me.
-I remember my dad tellin' me about Winston Churchill
and how he really suffered
from really bad bouts of depression
and how he called it "the black dog."
And this is the song that I don't really remember
recording or... or writing,
but the black dog makes his appearance,
so I'm assuming I was in a pretty dark state.
I had a gig in Boston and got to Boston,
and I called my manager, and I said, "I can't move,
I can't leave the room, I just can't."
I just couldn't -- I couldn't find my way out.
Sunny mornin'
You can hear it
Sirens warning
There is weather on
Both sides
I hear it coming
I remember saying to Scooter,
"I feel like I need to go somewhere,
but I can't face the press."
He said, "Stay where you are, I'm coming to get you."
Just like before
There's a black dog that
Scratches my door
He's been growling my name
Sayin'
You better get to running
-She called me and said, "I can't do this."
She was really depressed; it was overwhelming.
I think the highs and lows of being an artist
that's been riding this level of success
for a while can be very, um...
suffocating.
- Can you make it
Better for me?
Can you maybe see the light of day?
'Cause I got no one
Who will bring me a big umbrella
While I'm watching The Weather Channel and
I'm waiting for the storm
I can remember talking to Scooter on the phone
and saying, "If I had the energy
to get up and run across my loft
and throw myself out the window, I would,
but I don't even --
I don't know that I even care that much."
You know, stuff that didn't feel characteristic
of my outlook on life.
That was when it got kind of worrisome.
But I don't feel so human
-Levon Helm used to say,
"Girl, I'll guard your gun side."
That's what I have in my manager.
He completely guarded my gun side.
However he did it, I could walk into Mount Sinai
with an appointment with someone
and get it together over a period of,
you know, quite a few months.
-The handful of times I've gotten those phone calls
when she's having a rough time,
it caused a lot of anxiety in me.
But I know my position here is to help her through it
and to be kind of foundational.
It's more than just a business with her and I,
way more, so I try to make her understand
she's heard and safe and it will pass.
- You won't want me
Standing around the birthday pony
Even though it's just a game
You know we are the same
But you're the better faker
Just a little happy song about...
suicidal tendencies.
-I first heard the song,
"Are you strong enough to be my man,"
I didn't hear it on the radio, I saw it on a video.
Sheryl came on and she sings this song
and I thought, for women like Sheryl and I,
who have this extreme kind of career,
every time we meet a new nice man,
it crosses our mind: Are you strong enough
to possibly deal with our incredibly odd life, right?
-So true.
-And so from that moment onward,
I thought, you know, this is a great song
for any women that have, like, extreme careers.
-Yeah -- and I couldn't have said that better.
God, I feel like hell tonight
Tears of rage I cannot lie
Be the last to help you understand
Are you strong enough to be my man?
My man
I was in the middle of being on the road
and making records and decided that this was
a relationship I really wanted to give my time to.
And the first year it was fantastic
and I was ready to get married.
I was ready to have a life!
It does get complicated, though,
when you have to dim your light
to be in somebody else's life.
Nothing's true and nothing's right
So let me be alone tonight
-You know, you have a super sensitive artist
and a super alpha powerful athlete.
Lance's view is, "I'm going to win at all costs,"
which he did.
And Sheryl's
not like that in the same way.
-To put everything in my life aside
in order to nurture that,
it wasn't a healthy situation for me.
And then there was what all was going on
in his racing life,
and that was hard for me.
It was hard for everyone around.
-French investigators are still looking
at the team's blood samples.
-A guy who comes back from arguably,
you know, a death sentence.
Why would I then enter into a sport and dope myself up
and risk my life again? That's crazy!
I would never do that! That's -- no.
No way.
- Lie to me
I promise I'll believe
The urine samples were all coming out.
It was a nightmare,
and I think we'd had a giant blow up
and then within a couple of days,
this five- or six-carat diamond showed up.
And you know, sadly, that's what I wanted,
but I didn't want it like that.
You know, I didn't -- I didn't want it like that.
We split up and then, "Oh, for God's sakes,
have a mammogram scheduled, last thing I want to do,"
but I go and do it,
and they find some suspect calcifications
and say, "Come back in six months
and we'll look at it again."
And my gynecologist called and said,
"You may as well find out what this is
because waiting six months could be the difference
in Stage I or Stage II."
And I went in and had a needle biopsy,
was not really thinking about it --
I was thinking about a lot of other things.
-Well, it was the worst thing
that's ever happened in our family.
Now you talk about something that was just
incredible, unreal.
That was it -- a phone call around dinnertime at night,
that she's been diagnosed with cancer.
And you don't have any idea of...
what the outcome is,
what the degree of it is.
You have this horrible feeling everything's going to
come crashing down.
-When I was diagnosed with breast cancer,
there was just stuff swirling around everywhere in the news,
and the press, and having been a "likable" artist,
people were rooting for me and then there were also --
there was a lot of fear being projected at me like,
"Oh, my God, if it can happen to her and she's so healthy,
it could happen to me," and people praying,
and then people that didn't like me like,
"Well, that's what she gets," and even my relationship
with what I felt like was humanity at large,
the craving to see pictures of me at my worst --
I was pissed.
I mean, I get -- I feel how pissed I was
when I even talk about it.
I just was like, "What the eff
just happened to my life?"
And I felt like I didn't deserve it.
-You know, we were so involved in it together with her.
It just looked like the end of something.
-I went with her parents and sister
to a couple of the first meetings with the oncologist
and the whole team.
And then I had to go do the business part of it --
cancel the tours and take everything off the calendar
and just start to pray and support.
-When you are diagnosed,
all your dreams and everything is over.
It's the end.
That's what you're faced with.
My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.
It's beyond traumatic.
It's such a terrifying situation.
-It sort of dictates that everybody figure out
where they are with that person,
like how do I help you, how do I fix this?
And it's just not fixable.
-I always didn't look over there --
at cancer -- because...
it was too much of a big, scary monster.
But what Sheryl taught my wife
was that you have to get educated.
You have to learn about it.
And then you can deal with it.
-I appreciate the opportunity to testify before you today
on the Breast Cancer Environmental Research Act.
As a breast cancer survivor and advocate,
I am very passionate about getting
this bill enacted this year.
-Sheryl gave my wife so much guidance.
Up here.
Sheryl is a survivor.
-I have no idea why I got breast cancer,
but what I do know is we need more resources
into figuring out what the environment has to
do with breast cancer.
-The first thing she did
was let a group of us in,
in a really deep and intimate way.
I've had very few friends
who've let me in when they needed me most.
She really did.
She gave me the opportunity to love her.
-I had this incredible tribe of women around me
that swept in
and carried me on their shoulders.
And when I was done,
they were there to get me back on my feet
and to get me back to who I wanted to be.
And I think women do that.
What do I do with this sweet love of mine?
Do I give it away
And hope some day I'll find
Someone half as awake
As the moon and the stars
Mother, teach me to love
With a paper-thin heart
When I came out of radiation,
I was sitting with my mom and I was saying, you know,
there -- there are things that I really had hoped
in my life I would have,
and I wanted to be a mom.
I wanted to be a mom like my mom was.
-She was lamenting about her life going on
and not ever having a family and not having any children,
and that was one of the worst things
about the predicament she was in.
-I had this story in my head about what that looked like,
you know, that looked like, you fall in love with someone,
you get married, you know, you buy a house,
you save your money, you have children,
blah-blah-blah -- like what I was raised with.
-She was miserably unhappy, she's been treated for cancer,
and now she faces that she'll never have any children.
And my instinct immediately was,
that's not necessarily true.
I mean, you can adopt beautiful children.
You can have your own family.
-My mom said, "You could get a sperm donor."
I'm like, "What?!"
-She thought at first I'd lost my mind.
You know, "You're trying to tell me to go out
and find some children?"
Well, yes.
-I remember having a conversation with my brother
when I was adopting my boys, I said,
"You know, it's so interesting because you --
when you adopt, you really don't know
exactly what you're getting," and he said,
"You know, when you have your own kids biologically,
you really don't know exactly what you're getting, either."
And that -- that made sense to me,
that resonated with me, because I feel like,
no matter if you have them biologically
or if you adopt them, you don't get the wrong kids.
-Hey, Mom, love you. There's Levi.
-Hi! -Here's me.
-We love you!
-No!
-I think Sheryl wanted to raise her kids
in an environment that was more akin
to where she grew up, but still she could be
in the mix of the music world.
- If I can't be someone else
If I can't be someone else
Oh, if I can't be someone else
I might as well be myself, myself
Ooh
We built a barn where the horses could live,
and I thought, I'm just going to put a writing room up here,
so it needs to be a little bit sound-proofed,
I moved all my vintage gear up here,
hung up my guitars, and I can come to work here.
-It's really pretty amazing, actually.
The studio itself is over a stable
with these fantastic horses,
and you would think that the horses would be spooked
by sound, but they're not --
they're just grooving.
-I love vintage amps, got to be vintage,
got to be a vintage box or vintage tweed; old snares.
Got to have a Black Beauty.
And then of course, I have to have a certain...
amount of just junk.
-Sheryl is a gear freak,
so you're going to work every day,
you're going, "I want that sound,
looking for that guitar sound,"
"Oh, that guitar right there," pull it off the wall, boom,
it's all set up and ready to go.
So if you have an idea,
you can jump right on it and play.
-I called Steve Jordan and said,
Will you make this record?
I don't know what it is,
but I know I want to bring Kris Kristofferson in
and I want to record with other people
that I've shared music with and I've shared life with.
And so that's what we did.
-"Threads" is the definition of what all those people
mean to her musically.
-I always felt like I was sort of born out of time.
All the artists that I had loved, I missed that boat.
I didn't get to be around with them when they were,
you know, really happening
and when they were all hanging out.
And that made such an impact
on this girl from Missouri
who had these dreams of hanging out
with Stevie Nicks and James Taylor
and, I mean, all these incredible artists
that have inspired me to write stories.
Endless, endless connections.
Who put the blame on me
You oughta pass you see
-What I do love about Sheryl is her love of music,
and I always feel happy around Sheryl, you know?
-She had that producer knowledge of the studio
and we recorded all the ideas and sorted through those
and then we cut a track.
-Sheryl's been able to do all those things
because she's that gifted and that talented
and that hard-working,
and also because she's a cool person to be around.
She's a big influence on me in that way.
-There's a weird thing that happens
when you become a legacy artist,
it's sort of a sideways compliment.
It's like, okay, you have stood the test of time,
but also you're old and you just haven't gone away.
You know what I mean? It's like, I don't know
how to hold the legacy thing.
-You think there's a secret?
No, there is no hidden...
potion or formula.
You just get stuck here
and you're still doing it and you still love it.
And in a way you're filled with amazement
that you are still here doing it.
But there ain't no secrets sticking around.
Just luck of the draw.
-When we got asked to do Bonnaroo, I was like,
"That is going to be amazing or absolutely awful."
I think we played at like four or five in the afternoon
and like, literally maybe 30 minutes before we played
nobody was out there, and I'm thinking,
"Well, okay,
I'm a legacy artist and I'm too old for this crowd."
And I don't know how, but when we walked out,
the place was just all the way back filled with people.
It was euphoric!
Because I didn't know if the audience --
and they're super young -- had been exposed to my music
because of their parents,
but they knew everything.
I been long, a long way from here
Put on a poncho and played for mosquitoes
And drank 'til I was thirsty again
I was literally looking at my band
who is, you know, for the most part my age,
maybe a couple of years younger
and maybe a couple of years older,
and we're all up there looking at each other going,
"What is happening?"
These young people, who are younger than these songs are,
they're the people that are out in the audience
that are, like, totally going for it
on "If It Makes You Happy."
I made this up
There is something liberating about lifting your voice.
If it makes you happy
It can't be that bad
-It has, I think, probably one of the best cut-loose choruses
of any modern rock song.
You know, the whole thing is kept really subdued
and it's cool and it's kind of stoned
and you're describing this day.
But then when she says, "if it makes you happy,"
it's like -- - If it makes you happy
-It all comes open.
- Let me hear you sing
It can't be that bad
If it makes you happy...
People feel themselves in that, they feel their power.
And when I get to sing it, I feel that power too.
I feel it in my gut and in my chest.
-When Sheryl shouts on that song,
she does have a whole kind of
"givin' it to the gods" vibe,
and it just cuts loose, it gives everyone else
permission to cut loose, all the heads go back,
and you can see it.
- Why the hell are you so sad?
It gets in there and it makes you express.
It's joy, man, it's just joy.
Come to me now
Lay your hands over me
Even if it's a lie
Say it will be all right
And I shall believe
-She is holding the torch
in a line of very rare iconic voices.
- And I do believe
-You know, she comes from a long line of strong women.
Tina Turner, Bonnie Raitt, Aretha.
Fantastic women who have made their place in this business
without compromising.
- Please say honestly you won't give up on me
I shall believe
-Sheryl figured out a way
to tell the truth through her talent,
and whether it's about our brokenness
or our longing or our grief,
she's not going to shy away from the truth.
-For Sheryl, it's always about the music
and being true to herself.
-It's called "the feel," you know,
and either you feel it or you're don't.
What you're trying to do is to pass that feeling on.
And Sheryl can do that.
-The life I have is
completely informed by her and vice versa.
It's bigger than a statement that I could make.
You can't put a label on that.
You know, it's -- it's kind of just a miracle.
It's a miracle, really.
- I shall believe
I shall believe
Oh
I'm just open, I'm just trying to learn.
I'm going to fall, I'm going to make mistakes,
but I'm also going to do some things I'm really proud of,
and things that really speak to who I am
and my character and my desires.
If I'm honest with myself, what art is, is a picture
of who you are at any given moment.
And looking back on my career, my body of work,
I could safely say it is pretty honest.
Oh
Please say honestly
You won't give up on me
I'm gonna keep on keepin' on
Keepin' on, keepin' on
What the world needs now
Is love, sweet love
Sing it with me now.
Here we go!
What the world needs now
- ...love, sweet love
- Oh
What the world
- Needs now
- Love, sweet love
Ooh
One, two, three, four...
Lay your head down, don't you worry tonight
Can't fix the world no matter how you try
Give it some time, you will find everything is all right
There's no such thing as forever
But you and me, we got today
And every moment we're together
I know there is a heaven
'Cause you make me feel that way
When I get down, you're the one that I call
You picked me up every time that I fall
And when you left, nothing else matters to me
At all
There's no such thing as forever
But you and me, we got today
Every moment we're together
I know there is a heaven
'Cause you make me feel that way
Garbage out in space, garbage in the lake
Baby, what a waste
Everybody's mad, everybody's sad
See it in their face
I gotta have the latest, gotta have the best
The most, if you wanna be happy, light a match
And watch it all go up in smoke